Guys, To begin, a familiar story for many of you I'm sure - we have a customer who has MSSQL databases, and wants TDP backups going back a month or so. Easy, bread and butter stuff. Happy with this, they want their backups from every Friday to be retained for 4 weeks, and from every 4th Friday to last for 7 years. As the TDP stores the SQL backups in a backup copygroup, we don't have that level of flexibility easily built in to the tool to provide what is essentially more of an 'archive' type request.
The normal response at this point is to 'use different node names - ABC123_WEEKLY or ABC123_MONTHLY', and this is indeed what I have done frequently before. However, I can't help feeling this isn't quite perfect, having to make our non TSM savvy client (on a remote site) faff around with different node names and explain to them why TSM has to be handled in this way. It's not that big a deal really, but I'm aiming for simplification here. Now, my question is whether anyone is achieving the fulfilment of such requirements in another way, for example using 'set backups'. According to the docs, 'set backups are intended to be used in unusual one-of-a-kind situations [...] Because set backups are always uniquely named (like log backups), they do not participate in expiration due to version limit [...] The reason for using a set backup is if you do not want the backup to be part of your normal expiration process.' Sounds like a possibility - anyone using these already? We've a similar requirement coming in for Informix backups - again, from what I've seen of ONBAR so far, having out-of-sync weekly/monthly/yearly backups could be a challenge when using the same node name. With Oracle backups, we've managed to overcome this by customising the RMAN backup piece tags, and expiring manually from RMAN based upon these to identify logs, weekly and monthly backup pieces etc - works very smoothly indeed. Your thoughts, especially on a Friday afternoon, are always much appreciated :O) Rgds, David McClelland Tivoli Storage Manager Certified Consultant Operations Backup and Recovery Projects Shared Infrastructure Development Reuters 85 Fleet Street London EC4P 4AJ --------------------------------------------------------------- - Visit our Internet site at http://www.reuters.com Get closer to the financial markets with Reuters Messaging - for more information and to register, visit http://www.reuters.com/messaging Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Reuters Ltd.